The New Chrome 46 Comes With Security Fixes And New Developer Features

The newer version of Chrome, Chrome 46 has been launched for Windows, Mac and Linux and it is focussed primarily on security changes ( 24 security fixes to be precise) among which the major change is the simplification of Page Security icon. Chrome 46 will mark the “HTTPS with Minor Errors” state using the same neutral page icon as HTTP pages.

Previously, in Chrome 45, HTTPS websites with minor errors used to be marked with a yellow “caution triangle” badge on the page security icon in the URL bar. Google gave two reasons for this change in the blog post announcing the update: a better visual indication of the security state of the page relative to HTTP and fewer security states to learn for users. The move has reduced the number of security states from 4 to 3 and Google plans to bring down this number to just two states, secure and not secure.

The change will majorly affect the pages with mixed content mostly caused during migration from HTTP to HTTPS, for example, HTTPS pages with HTTP images which is undesirable in the long term but important for debugging the migration.

Removing the yellow “caution triangle” badge means that most users will not perceive a warning on mixed content pages during such a migration. We hope that this will encourage site operators to switch to HTTPS sooner rather than later”,

read the blog post.

The focus on HTTPS was further reiterated and justified by Google’s web performance engineer Ilya Grigorik who wrote in his Google+ post about the growth of HTTPS navigations from 58% to 63% in the past year adding that the goal is to get to 100%.

In addition to the above security changes, there are many developer changes also in Chrome 46, for example, new CSS animation features, improved performance controls, and a large number of API tweaks. Developers can now disable Chrome’s default scroll restoration behavior on history navigation when it interferes with the app’s user experience and can also negotiate with the server to download the best image variant for a device using straightforward HTTP request headers.